Srinivasa Ramanujan was a renowned Indian mathematician born in 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, India who made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis and worked on elliptic functions and analytic number theory. He was educated at Pachaiyappa College and the University of Cambridge. Ramanujan had a natural talent for mathematics and independently developed his own methods and theorems without formal training, such as finding solutions to cubic and quintic equations.